A
pink-orange twilight filtered through the bay window in my office.
A swoosh filled the silence as file after file descended into oblivion.
So many outrages, so little time, I thought. Editors pushed for a
24- to 48-hour turnaround on news commentaries. I no longer could
churn out pieces fast enough and still fine-tune them.

As
I went about freeing up countless drawers and boxes, I reflected upon
the compulsive sense of urgency I had felt when I was penning my books.
Oh, how I agonized over those first speeches and articles! If I got
held up in traffic, even for 10 minutes coming home from work, it
was 10 minutes I wouldn’t have that night.

Many
of my colleagues struggled similarly. Before there was hard evidence
of legislation presaging universal mental-health screening, before
there were Smart Cards, traffic cameras and computer viruses, many
of us recognized that the America we knew was living on borrowed time:
an America where topics like rape and sodomy were thankfully spoken
in whispers; an America that required prospective immigrants to have
a sponsor and a job; an America where Judeo-Christian values were
the gold standard, but where other beliefs were respected as long
as public safety was not at risk; an America where a person’s time
was not all but taken up satisfying government diktats; an
America that rewarded initiative instead of “process”; an America
where you could turn on your television and radio without being grossed
out.

By
the late 1960s, conservative writers were barely make a living, as
one by one, magazines, newspapers, publishing houses, and independent
radio and television stations were taken over or marginalized by the
left. Conservative publications, even the few successful ones, could
not afford to place magazines at the corner drug store or give newspapers
away free of charge for six months like their liberal counterparts.

The
left, of course, always had access to funds, through second and third
parties, and so their version of events wound up being what most people
saw and what permeated the schools. A gift from George Soros here,
a Rockefeller Foundation grant there, an Armand Hammer endowment somewhere
else -- they could scarcely have spent it all.

The
conservative groups were left to battle it out for limited resources.
This resulted in continual infighting, and a revolving door of poorly
paid, barely out-of-college gofers, who packed their brief cases the
minute they were able to command a decent salary. The few who stayed
on to assume higher profile positions (typically thanks to a well-positioned
relative) too often exchanged their zeal in digging out the truth
for a big ego. Swelled-Head Syndrome became a condition commensurate
with one’s lofty, if precarious, position within the conservative
network.

Two
examples: A renowned educational analyst wrote in 2001 to the chairman
of a conservative non-profit (which shall remain unnamed). The organization
had enjoyed some success in challenging universities that discriminated
against conservative students and professors. The analyst outlined
what he saw as serious missteps in the Republican strategy, especially
with regard to academic freedom and free conscience, the organization’s
primary interests. His letter was three pages long, but thorough.
He asked for a meeting and included his e-mail address. The letter
was diverted to the vice-Chairman of the organization who, in turn,
e-mailed a colleague that the writer was “long-winded but apparently
well-connected” and should get a perfunctory response to “keep him
happy.” This insulting e-mail was re-transmitted (accidentally?)
via e-mail to the analyst in question along with the boilerplate letter
that was supposed to “keep him happy.”

Needless
to say, the man never made contact with that organization again, even
though it could well have benefited from his expertise.

In
a personal incident: I was invited to meet with a highly placed conservative
leader to discuss the No Child Left Behind Act. This prominent conservative
(who shall similarly remain unnamed) “forgot” our first meeting, according
to his office manager, and never called to apologize. Upon rescheduling
(which I initiated), this same muckety-muck spent our short time together
scanning his e-mail, blowing his nose, answering the phone for trivial
matters and noisily munching a snack. At length, he asked me to make
a three-minute presentation at his organization’s meeting of top conservatives
-- about 100 people. I accepted the offer and took annual leave from
work.

The
meeting ran out of time and I didn’t present. I didn’t know whether
to reschedule or not. At length, I took the initiative, thinking perhaps
I was expected to show up the next week. The office manager confirmed
I was on the schedule. Thanks for telling me, I thought. I
took off work again. This time, Mr. Big-Shot was on travel, so a 20-something
girl from a different organization served as moderator. Armed with
handouts that I distributed beforehand (standard operating procedure
for presenters), I waited. And waited.

Finally,
after nearly half the attendees had left, I was called. I had whittled
my talk to under three minutes (a limit nobody else actually bothered
about), and began by referencing my handouts. The young lady interrupted,
saying that since I had disseminated handouts, I could sit down. I
laughed and said thank you, but I’d take my 3 minutes. The girl was
repeatedly rude -- so much so that jaws dropped. Nobody, including
me, had a clue what her problem was. The remaining attendees applauded
my presentation when I had finished, probably more to compensate for
the girl’s performance than because of anything I said. Since that
time, Mr. Big-Shot began toadying to “conservative” homosexual activists,
much to the dismay of traditionalists in his camp, and Her Snottyship
has moved on to other endeavors, in keeping with the ever-revolving
door that has become the “mainstream conservative network.” (Apparently,
my experience with her had not been unique.)

Liberal
powerhouses like the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies and the
Carnegie Foundation do not make these blunders. They turn on the charm.
Such boorish behavior on the part of a few conservative leaders exemplifies
how drunk some have become on their own importance -- which, for all
the good it has done, has amounted to their not being very important
at all.

Meanwhile,
the publishing world had changed, and writers of all political stripes
were told that “nobody reads anymore.” By the 1980s, one’s work had
to be concise to the point of being factually bereft. If it didn’t
read like Tom Clancy, claimed the syndicates, no one would pick it
up. Thus my first book, Educating for the New World Order:
reviewers and talk show hosts rhapsodized that it read “like a spy
novel.” Readers snatched it up, then begged for more. So I wrote a
second, much longer tome, proving that people did read, after all.

In
the 1990s, books by many conservatives hit the shelves -- a good sign,
we thought, portending a showdown between parents and government schools.
But it didn’t pan out that way. Conscientious parents didn’t have
an American Civil Liberties Union to pop out of a hat with pro bono
help. Lawsuits took years and were expensive. Most parent-activist
groups eventually burned out.

Research-writers
like me tended to hold alternative “day jobs,” often outside our real
areas of expertise. A few held high positions within government agencies,
including the U.S. Department of Education. Like me, they didn’t like
what they were seeing, and not merely from a political-party or Oval
Office perspective, but from the bureaucracy, non-governmental organizations
(NGOs) and special interest groups, which were showering legislators
under the table with soft support and perks only hinted at in the
recent lobbying scandal starring Jack Abramoff.

Eventually,
every serious writer I knew was drowning in a sea of paper and e-mails.
Scores of colleagues threw in the towel. The rest of us rationalized
that there would be other years to watch a favorite television special,
hike in the woods, take a non-business-related trip, or just sit outside
and do nothing for awhile. The liberals, of course, had all the time
in the world. Conservative alliances started breaking up as new upstarts
and a few old-guard think-tanks went RINO (Republicans in Name Only)
– the price of legitimacy in the new order.

There
are, of course, still millions of folks who revere traditional American
values (e.g., the success of films like “The Passion of the Christ”
and “The Chronicles of Narnia” and news services like NewsWithViews.com,
NewsMax and WorldNetDaily), but overall the statistics tell a different
story.

To
put the matter in perspective, consider the popular TV series “Star
Trek: Enterprise.” The show was canceled in 2004 because, according
to TV Guide, “only” 2.8 million people were watching it. Forget for
a moment whether you liked, hated, or even tuned in to the program.
Until about 1965, 2.8 million people doing anything would have been
considered an awesome figure. Today, it doesn’t mean diddly. Media
executives, like policymakers, are interested in figures over 65 million.

Shock-jock
Howard Stern is slated to get hundreds of millions of dollars from
his new contract with Sirius Satellite Radio for just this reason.
Many more people apparently like drivel, smut and bathroom “humor”
than are interested in what used to be called “family entertainment.”
More sophisticated qualities like subtlety, cleverness, riveting plots
and characterization are becoming rarities. Polls, of course, are
predominantly liberal and probably skewed to augment figures supporting
garbage and claptrap. Even so, the delta between 2.8 million and 65
million is hard to fake.

More
significantly, every graduating high school class brings a whole new
slate of “legal adults” into the fold. These “grownups” don’t remember
what family entertainment used to look like. As they join the ranks
of voters, consumers, and workers, they bring the “new” value system
they learned in school with them, and our nation descends further
into socialism, welfare, casual sex, narcissism, and political correctness.

As
long as the liberal-left faction of government was denying what it
was doing, time was on our side. Traditionalists had a chance of winning
the larger culture war. But when the opposition began bragging about
what it was doing instead of denying it, we started losing in earnest.
Now we are in a position where people of principle are subject to
government harassment at every turn.

The
world has visited this scenario before, under the Nazis and the Soviets,
but this time it comes with the “benefits” of computerized cross-matching
and high-tech, long-term tracking. Several news outlets reported this
month that New York City has begun tracking its diabetic residents.
If you think it will stop with diabetics or New York City, you’re
dreaming!

We
should have drawn a line in the sand during the hippie movement of
the 1970s, a phase that most of us thought would fizzle. Instead it
morphed. Had our side quickly bought up media outlets, launched new
television and radio stations en masse, funded newspapers in every
city, created alternative schools and franchised them, launched class-action
lawsuits to stem the dissemination of filth, made pariahs of organizations
like the American Civil Liberties Union, and insisted on laws reigning
in the fledgling computer technologies, we might have stemmed the
political tsunami. Had we told the environmental extremists where
to get off, beginning back when they were first protecting bugs over
humans, we might still have trash cans in our parks instead of being
forced to carry doggie droppings and empty paper plates from concession
stands in baggies on our belt.

But
we chose to spend the money on election campaigns and Republican Senatorial
Committees, even though we had no press to disseminate our message,
and no school system to reinforce our values.

Moreover,
in 30 years we have succeeded only in filling a few legislative seats
with Republican protoplasm, a result which produced only temporary,
meager gains.

As
the eminent columnist Mark Steyn put it in his January 4, 2006, column
for the Wall Street JournalIt’s
the Demography, Stupid “…much of what we loosely call the Western
world will not survive this century, and much of it will effectively
disappear within our lifetimes….[Places like] Italy and the Netherlands
will merely be designations for real estate. The challenge for those
who reckon Western civilization is on balance better than the alternatives
is to figure out a way to save at least some parts of the West.”

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That
pretty much sums up the situation.

As
I disposed of the contents in the last file drawer, I couldn’t help
brooding. How did a fiercely independent, can-do populace turn into
a collection of resigned, apathetic and submissive sheep is so short
a time? A little voice seemed to whisper: “Sorry, that’s above your
pay grade.”

Beverly Eakman is an Educator, 9 years: 1968-1974,
1979-1981. Specialties: English and Literature.

Science Editor, Technical Writer and Editor-in-Chief
of official newspaper, National Aeronautics and Space Administration,
1974-1979. Technical piece, "David, the Bubble Baby," picked up by popular
press and turned into a movie starring John Travolta.

Chief speech writer, National Council for Better
Education, 1984-1986; for the late Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, Commission
on the Bicentennial of the US Constitution, 1986-1987; for the Voice of
America Director, 1987-1989; and for U.S. Department of Justice, Gerald
R. Regier, 1991-1993.